The Trump administration released a report last week that it billed as a “clear, evidence-based foundation” for action on a range of children’s health issues.
But the report, from the presidential Make America Healthy Again Commission, cited studies that did not exist. These included fictitious studies on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, mental illness and medications prescribed for children with asthma.
“It makes me concerned about the rigor of the report, if these really basic citation practices aren’t being followed,” said Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University who was listed as the author of a paper on mental health and substance use among adolescents. Dr. Keyes has not written any paper by the title the report cited, nor does one seem to exist by any author.
The news outlet NOTUS first reported the presence of false citations, and The New York Times identified additional faulty references. By midafternoon on Thursday, the White House had uploaded a new copy of the report with corrections.
Dr. Ivan Oransky — who teaches medical journalism at New York University and is a co-founder of Retraction Watch, a website that tracks retractions of scientific research — said the errors in the report were characteristic of the use of generative artificial intelligence, which has led to similar issues in legal filings and more.
Dr. Oransky said that while he did not know whether the government had used A.I. in producing the report or the citations, “we’ve seen this particular movie before, and it’s unfortunately much more common in scientific literature than people would like or than really it should be.”
Asked at a news conference on Thursday whether the report had relied on A.I., the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, deferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Emily Hilliard, a spokeswoman for the department, did not answer a question about the source of the fabricated references and downplayed them as “minor citation and formatting errors.” She said that “the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic-disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”
The false references do not necessarily mean the underlying facts in the report are incorrect. But they indicate a lack of rigorous review and verification of the report and its bibliography before it was released, Dr. Oransky said.
“Scientific publishing is supposed to be about verification,” he said, adding: “There’s supposed to be a set of eyes, actually several sets of eyes. And so what that tells us is that there was no good set of eyes on this.”
Researchers previously told The Times that they agreed with many of the report’s points, like its criticism of synthetic chemicals in the U.S. food supply and of the prevalence of ultraprocessed foods. (An early copy of the report shared with reporters did not include citations.)
But doctors have disagreed with some of the report’s other suggestions, including that routine childhood vaccines may be harmful — which scientists say is based on an incorrect understanding of immunology.
The news that some citations were fake further undermines confidence in the report’s findings, Dr. Keyes said.
She noted that her research had indeed shown that rates of depression and anxiety were rising among adolescents, as the report said they were. But the faulty citation “certainly makes me concerned about the evidence base that conclusions are being drawn from,” she said.
The report also originally cited a paper on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs published in The Lancet in 2005. A paper with that title does exist, but it was a perspective piece from an expert, not a study. It was published in a different journal five years earlier, and was not written by the cited author.
Another citation incorrectly referred to a paper on the link between sleep, inflammation and insulin sensitivity. The citation included a co-author who did not work on the paper, and omitted a researcher who did; it also listed the wrong journal. The citation has now been corrected, but Thirumagal Kanagasabai, a researcher in Toronto and the lead author on the paper, said she was shocked an incorrect citation had made it in there in the first place.
“I just don’t understand that,” she said. “How could it get mixed up?”
The report also pointed to what it said was a 2009 paper in The Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology by “Findling, R.L., et al.,” on the advertising of psychiatric medications. A spokesman for Virginia Commonwealth University, where Dr. Robert L. Findling works as a professor of psychiatry, said Dr. Findling had not written the article.
Experts said that even some correctly cited papers were inaccurately summarized. For example, the report said that the fifth edition of a guide used by psychiatrists to classify mental health conditions had loosened criteria for A.D.H.D. and bipolar disorder, driving a 40-fold increase in diagnoses in children from 1994 to 2003.
But that edition was not published until 2013. The diagnoses mentioned in the cited study would have been made using an earlier version.
In addition, the data appeared to originate from a 2007 study that refers to an approximately 40-fold increase in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder among youth from 1994 to 2003, but does not mention increases in A.D.H.D. prevalence.
Part of what makes the errors so striking, Dr. Kanagasabai said, is that the importance of citations is drilled into young researchers even in the earliest stages of their careers.
“You want to always go back to the original source, and you want to make sure that source is correct,” she said.
Christina Caron contributed reporting.
Dani Blum is a health reporter for The Times.
Maggie Astor covers the intersection of health and politics for The Times.
The post White House Health Report Included Fake Citations appeared first on New York Times.
